Mario Reading - The Third Antichrist

The

Third

Antichrist

Mario Reading is a multi-talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction. His varied life has included selling rare books, teaching riding in Africa, studying dressage in Vienna, running a polo stable in Gloucestershire and maintaining a coffee plantation in Mexico. An acknowledged expert on the prophecies of Nostradamus, Reading is the author of eight non-fiction titles, as well as the bestselling novel The Nostradamus Prophecies .

Also by Mario Reading

THE NOSTRADAMUS TRILOGY

The Nostradamus Prophecies

The Mayan Codex

The Third Antichrist

NON-FICTION

The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus

Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies for the Future

Nostradamus: The Good News

Dictionary of Cinema

The Movie Companion

The Watkins Dictionary of Dreams

Nostradamus: The Top 100 Prophecies

Nostradamus and the Third Antichrist: Napoleon,

Hitler and the One Still to Come

FICTION

The Music-Makers

First published in the UK in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Mario Reading, 2011.

The moral right of Mario Reading to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously.

1 3 5 7 9 2 4 6 8

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-85789-666-7
eISBN: 978-0-85789-479-3

Printed in Great Britain.

Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
Ormond House
26-27 Boswell Street
London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Here are three of Nostradamuss Third Antichrist quatrains, originally published between 1555 and 1558. See my book Nostradamus and the Third Antichrist: Napoleon, Hitler and the One Still To Come (Watkins, 2011) for the remaining thirty-three.

*

INDEX DATE: 35

CENTURY NUMBER: 3

Du plus profond de lOccident dEurope,

De pauvres gens un ieune enfant naistra,

Qui par sa langue seduira grande troupe:

Son bruit au regne dOrient plus croistra .

From deep in the Western part of Europe

A child will be born, to poor parents

He will seduce the multitude with his tongue

The noise of his reputation will grow in the Eastern kingdom.

*

INDEX DATE: 10

CENTURY NUMBER: 10

Tasche de murdre enormes adulteres,

Grand ennemy de tout le genre humain

Que sera pire quayeulx, oncles, ne peres

En fer, feu, eau, sanguin & inhumain .

Stained with mass murder and adultery

This great enemy of humanity

Will be worse than any man before him

In steel, fire, water, bloody and monstrous.

*

INDEX DATE: 32

CENTURY NUMBER: 7

Du mont Royal naistra dune casane,

Qui cave & compte viendra tyranniser,

Dresser copie de la marche Millane,

Favene Florence dor & gens expuiser .

Though born in poverty, he will take supreme power

He will tyrannize and bankrupt his people

Raising a thousand-year army

He will seem lucky, though he costs both lives and money.

EPIGRAPHS

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.

II Peter 3: 10

At that meeting he was struck for the first time by the endless variety of mens minds, which prevents a truth from ever presenting itself identically to two persons.

War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.

Penses DUn Biologiste by Jean Rostand

An Ocean With No Shore

By Ibn al-Arabi (11651240)

*

I marvelled at an ocean with no shore,
and at a shore without an ocean;
At a dawn without darkness,
and at a night with no daybreak;
Then later at a sphere with no locality
known to either fool or sage;
And at a sky-blue dome thrust high above the earth,
twirling driven;
And at a blossoming world with no heaven
and no hell, its secrets hidden...

I courted an eternal mystery;
for I was asked: Has thought bewitched you?
I answered: I cannot say;
my advice would be: have patience with it while you live.
But, in essence, once thought becomes established
in my mind, the embers stutter into flame,
and are consumed by inextinguishable fire
It was then told me: He does not pick a flower
who deems himself, by rights, freeborn.
He who woos a beauty in her bedroom, devoured by love,
will never carp at the bride-price!

I paid her dower and was given her in marriage
all through the night until the break of dawn
But I found only myself. Or rather
the person I married may his affair be noised abroad:
For, adding to the suns light
is the refulgent moon, the shining stars;
Reproached, like time though the Prophet

(blessings be upon his head!)
had once declared of your Lord that He is Time.

This book is a gift for my wife

CONTENTS

Cenucenca, Orheiul Vechi, Moldova
7 October 1982

Dracul Lupei killed his first man when he was twelve years old. On his birthday. Thursday, 7 October 1982.

He did not intend to. But later, when he bothered to think about it, he realized that it had been inevitable. Like a boy losing his virginity. But this the virginity thing he had done the year before with his sister Antanasia.

As far as his sister was concerned, she had only given him what she had already given to pretty much the entire adult male population of Cenucenca at one time or another. Draculs father, Adrian, rented her out on Friday nights when he needed drinking money for his rachiu . The two siblings shared a bedroom at the back of their fathers ramshackle wooden farmhouse, so Dracul had been forced to listen ever since the whole thing began, somewhere around Antanasias tenth birthday. He had listened for four years. Then, close on the arrival of his first erection, he had tried it for himself.

But killing a man was better. Much better.

In order to earn himself a little extra money, Dracul had formed the habit of setting out, early every Sunday morning, for the thirteenth-century Orheiul Vechi cave hermitage, situated six kilometres up the valley from his fathers house. The hermitage was a twenty-minute uphill walk from the nearby village of Butuceni. It was positioned on top of a wild plateau dominating the Rat River, just a few hundred yards from the equally vertiginous parish church of St Maria.

The prehistoric cave complex was almost completely sealed off from the outside world, as was the section that housed the now abandoned troglodyte monastery, which was set high on a massive limestone buttress overlooking the gorge. The remaining hermitage, which was all that was left of the once thriving Pestere monastery, loomed over a landscape that resembled nothing so much as a slice of the planet Mars, transposed, like an alien spaceship, onto the Gaeto-Dacian plateau.